Dreaming the Present: Time, Aesthetics, and the Black Cooperative Movement

Contributors to Utopian Studies and members of various utopian studies networks have acknowledged that Black utopias—in all the faces that utopianism can take—are still largely neglected and underrepresented in our publications, meetings, and theorizations (this also goes for utopias outside of White, Western normativity in general). Studies from within our field that sought to take the first steps to address this exclusion convincingly argue that, in the wake of Antiblackness (to use Christina Sharpe’s term), utopianism takes on different forms—spatial and temporal—than that from a position of White privilege. Irvin J. Hunt’s Dreaming the Present: Time, Aesthetics, and the Black Cooperative Movement, a study on Black cooperative movements originating in the United States, contributes to such considerations as it revises assessments and frameworks of Black activism. While avoiding the term utopia (and leaving unmentioned observations from utopian and communal studies that could reverberate with his approach), Hunt elaborates on a part of Black history that pertains to a range of debates in our field: it casts a spotlight on African American cooperative movements of the early twentieth century and crucially intervenes with the assessment of Black cooperative projects as benign integrationist schemes, hence allowing for a more utopian approach to them. Dreaming the Present theorizes on time and activism and contributes to the discussion of (non-)progressivism in the evaluation of political practice and as underlying academic methodologies. It thus engages critically with a debate that remains pivotal in utopian and communal studies—what are the parameters by which to determine if utopian practices are “successful”?In the introduction, Hunt highlights the two hallmarks of his writing: a “defetishization of the literary artifact” (4) and a decided focus on temporalities as uncovered via the aesthetic choices of the founders of each cooperative endeavor. Hence, he is treating them as artists and eloquent philosophers in their activism, paying close critical attention to the phrases they chose. Their choices also inform Hunt’s own methodology of non-progressivism. Arguing that time is of the essence within Black studies, his aim is to write up a “new iconography of social movement time” (8), though the term movement is eventually critically reevaluated. Hunt reads various texts on the selected cooperative projects—speeches, interviews, letters, documents, pictures, and fiction, largely by the founders of the respective cooperative projects—with the diligence and creativity others would bestow upon poems (e.g., “corps” is read for its homophonic, thus metonymic relation, to “corpse” [77]). He then intricately interweaves these readings with a range of conceptualizations on time, hope, property, social interaction, affect, humor, and necropower, to name but a few. This at times challenging read is probably most accessible for those versed in critical theory. While historical material underlies each chapter, the book provides only a few short historical overviews, as the pronounced focus lies on aesthetic choices and sensibilities. This is, of course, an issue of target audiences and disciplines, and Hunt manages to provide enough context to follow along. However, it may send historically minded readers back to the sources.The main body of the study consists of three chapters that focus on one cooperative project apiece. Each chapter traces how activists envisioned, founded, and organized a cooperative structure while aesthetically removing it from the temporalities of progress and, correlated to this, not keeping power in the hands of the founders. The first example is perhaps the most laborious: W. E. B. Du Bois’s indecisive impulses toward the Negro Cooperative Guild are revised as “sustained incipience,” a constant new beginning that is programmatic. Du Bois’s choices in barely setting up a cooperative network, despite the fervor of potential collaborators, is argued to be a strategic choice, a gesture for its own sake, with no intent toward completion but nonetheless showcasing activist endurance. From a small selection of quotes from articles, letters, and fiction (“The Comet” [1920] and The Quest of the Silver Fleece [1911]), Hunt sets out to construct a “shadow Du Bois” (20), who employs strategies that run counter to the institutional interventions and scientific methods of Du Bois, the publicly known researcher and activist. Among the heaps of theoretical excursus, though, the cooperative network, its aspirations, and the voice of this “second” Du Bois almost disappears.Next, Ella Baker’s and George Schuyler’s founding of the Young Negroes’ Cooperative League is rendered a “planned failure.” Hunt here concentrates on the multiple safeguards against permanent or omnipotent leadership that Baker and Schuyler affixed in founding documents, limiting their own influence within the League. In discussing the League, the chapter nuances Schuyler’s now infamous reputation, which is closely tied to his conservative politics of later years. Anecdotally, Hunt mentions that Schuyler, at the age of thirty-four, argued that anyone above the age of thirty-five is weary, disillusioned, and no longer capable of believing “in the power of their own organized effort” (qtd. on 90)—is this Schuyler’s uncanny, self-fulfilling prophecy regarding his own upcoming change of political camps? Hunt does much to emphasize Baker’s sometimes understated role in this collaboration and to highlight her crucial contribution in curbing any tendencies toward totalizing ideologies and hierarchies. However, why the complex leadership structure of the League is “bizarre” (90) may not be quite obvious to those familiar with attempts to establish nonhierarchical communities or decentralize power, and here Hunt misses the chance to engage with some of the corresponding activist and research traditions. In any case, the chapter does much more than its title, “Planned Failure,” would suggest. It convincingly shows the discourse on social movements to be reductive, and, with special focus on Black studies, complicates this discourse. Snugly in the middle of all this sits a crucial argument that informs Hunt’s agenda: By reevaluating conceptions of the success of activism, he attempts to sidestep both the “erroneous opposition between optimism and pessimism” (95) and the choice between hope and despair. Instead, with his research subjects he attends to temporalities, planned failures, the comic and the ecstatic.The final analysis is dedicated to Fannie Lou Hamer’s Freedom Farm, approached through Hamer’s ability to be “pluripresent.” Building on Walter Benjamin’s “dialectical image,” Hunt complexly argues that Hamer simultaneously engages different discourses, definitions, registers, and projects, remaining within the moments of tension and thus challenging rectilinear perceptions of time. Hamer and Freedom Farm in this way undermine “the logic of impact” (137). Here, Hunt most forcibly reevaluates the measurements of success. It is also the only historical chapter that includes a few communal voices; Hunt seems unaware of this curious omission in the rest of the book when he criticizes a journalist for the exact same negligence (164). Taking Hamer’s intellectual work seriously, the chapter traces how she redefines the nomenclature and legal conception of co-ops, exclusivist practices, ownership, time and place. The subchapters on “agriculture as the historical nexus of personhood and progress” (165) and the excursus on Freedom City provide additional insights on utopian practices. Hunt’s writing is most engrossing when in critical conversation with historical material, and this chapter abounds with such work, for example when discussing the non-exclusionary membership of Freedom Farm, or the significance of the project allegedly making “barely a dent” (137) on Black poverty.The conclusion and the afterword underline the necessity to reevaluate success within an Antiblack world, and with it the underlying dominant temporalities. They also gesture toward Indigenous and Brown perspectives. In the conclusion, Hunt turns his attention to contemporary cooperative land sovereignty projects—the Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi, and the Earthseed Land Collective in Durham, North Carolina (inspired by Octavia Butler’s Parable series). The afterword reminisces about an interview with Stephanie Morningstar, co-director of Northeast Farmers of Color Land Trust. Pointing out concepts so far not discussed in the text, these closing sections emphasize that the continuity of the Black cooperative movement lies in its finding of other tenses.Dreaming the Present evokes and enlists a range of critical thinkers, an overview of which would exceed the length of this review. Various members of the Frankfurt School, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Pheng Chea, John Locke, and many more are arranged around the historic snippets that Hunt interprets, with maybe the most prominent place graced by Saidiya Hartman’s work. Each cooperative movement, or rather, the aesthetics of each respective founder, is granted its own critical array. The chapters therefore at times only loosely relate to one another, not only because all of the projects that they describe claimed novelty and left predecessors and contemporaries largely unmentioned (10) but because each chapter approaches these projects through constantly redeveloped theoretical paradigms. As a result, Dreaming the Present produces a cornucopia of quotable aphorisms but does not settle within a clear framework. That is, staying on track of the critical baseline poses a difficult task at times. In line with conventions of critical writing, some subchapters delve deep into theoretical and philosophical small print. This should not deter readers, as Hunt manages the challenging task to always return to more easily approachable analyses. A note of caution has to be issued in regard to historical accuracy: Hunt at times singles out sources in a way that obscures important contexts. One glaring example would be Schuyler’s commentary that he has been “greatly amused” (123) by the success of his Black Internationale/Black Empire serial, which is then taken to argue that this emphasizes the novel’s humor, and in turn the humor that went into organizing the League. Cut off, however, is Schuyler’s immediate conclusion that this success “vindicates [his] low esteem for the human race,” which throws up two questions: Is this contempt also transferrable to the League, and its members? And what other aesthetic choices have consciously been left unconsidered to make this study more vibrant?While these uncertainties direct scholars to the archives, they do not detract from the theoretical work Hunt does toward resituating Black cooperatives and rethinking activism in the face of imperilment and deprivation. Hunt successfully brings together Black studies and critical theory on temporalities and on activism to highlight how these cooperatives cannot and should not be evaluated by longevity, membership numbers, turnover, amassed capital, etc., and that we, as scholars in utopian studies, need to consider how breaking with these logics of racist capitalism, as epitomized in Antiblackness, is a disruption of time that is possibly utopian in itself.